Developer Toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer

by Mad

Microsoft has released a developer toolbar for Microsoft Internet Explorer which may be useful to SEO folk for ad-hoc analysis of individual pages.

For example, it allows the details of the commonly used description and keywords meta tags without having to troll through the raw html source code.

Tooltips are used to allow the all of the content to be displayed.

It is interesting to note that MS capitalize the tag names within the toolbar even though lowercase is the strict W3C definition.

A suggestion for MS with respect to visually distinguishing between the different meta tags is to include the name value within the navigation tree on the left hand side. For example, instead of “<META>” you would see “<META name=’description’>”.

The other common SEO attribute is the title tag, but viewing the actual contents is confusing at first as nothing is shown when the title tag is viewed even though one is set.

To view the value of the title tag you need to use the innerText attribute of the tag, which is done by checking the “Show Read-Only Properties”.

Another suggestion for MS would be for the innerText attribute to always be displayed.

Without going into too much detail, there are a lot of interesting things you can do with the toolbar:

1. Easily resize Internet Explorer to 800×600, 1024×768 etc to see what your page looks like for the resolutions you want to support.
2. Easy access to W3C validation tools and link checker, and accessibility reports.
3. Ability to turn off CSS – which is interesting for no other purpose that to see how awful a page looks.
4. Table and div tags etc can be outlined on the screen.
5. You can change the class of a tag and see its effect immediately before you edit the change within the actual page file. All other read-write attributes can be changed also.
6. The toolbar can annotate the tag to image sizes, link paths, etc. For example, viewing link paths replaces the original text of:

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